Syed Adnan Ali

About Syed Adnan Ali

• Over 1 million prostate biopsies are performed annually in the United States annually while only a quarter present with cancer.
• Most of these biopsy procedures are triggered by abnormal PSA test results that are associated with false-positive and false-negative findings for cancer. In several cases, the biopsies themselves miss clinically significant cancer, or underestimate grade and stage.
• These inaccuracies caused by the use of PSA testing and systematic biopsies as confirmation tools for cancer diagnoses point to the urgent medical need for the development of better diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers as well as more accurate biopsy techniques.
• Dr. Syed Adnan Ali proposes to develop a clinical decision tool for the accurate detection of aggressive prostate cancers employing the technique of Single Nucleus Sequencing that allows studying the genomic alterations in single cancerous cells.
• He will study and compare radical prostatectomy specimens from prostate cancer patients with a minimum follow-up of 5 years, those in whom the disease recurred and those who did not relapse.
• These studies will lead to the identification of specific genetic events that characterize aggressive cancers and can serve as biomarkers in urine and biopsy specimens, providing clinicians with useful tools to select patients either for aggressive treatment or for active surveillance of disease in low-risk patients.

What this means to patients: Dr. Ali is identifying specific biomarkers that will potentially allow clinicians to select patients for either aggressive treatment (high-risk disease) or active surveillance (low-risk disease).